Established in 1958, the year following the Soviets' launch of Sputnik, by the late 1960s, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had become a giant organization with 11 major field centers across the nation and more than 30,000 employees. Focusing on the diversity of the “engineering cultures” in the geographically scattered organization, Yasushi Sato presents a new study of NASA.
What lies at the core of this book is a historical description of conflicts at a time when ideas and methods regarding systems engineering were introduced into the field of space development. In the 1960s, engineers and managers at NASA headquarters adopted systems engineering to carry out various projects, above all, the Apollo program. However, engineers at the field centers did not accept systems engineering easily. Sato argues that engineers at the different field centers had adopted different localized engineering cultures, which were generally incompatible with the formalizing and depersonalizing nature of systems engineering.
